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Starfarers
Explorers set off to contact a civilization thousands of light years away...
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Starfarers
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By Poul Anderson
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Tor Books
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$25.95/$35.95 Canada
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Hardcover, Nov. 1998
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ISBN 0-312-86037-4
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Review by Clinton Lawrence
 n Poul Anderson's latest novel, Starfarers, scientists have detected trails of X-rays that indicate spaceships traveling at near the speed of light. The discovery leads to a fundamental breakthrough in the understanding of cosmology, and a new spaceship drive that borrows, then pays back, energy from the universe's substrate. The drive requires jumps of about 100 astronomical units, so it's useless for moving around the solar system, but it does make interstellar travel feasible. Because of time dilation, interstellar travelers age only months as decades pass on the planets they visit. As planets in other solar systems are colonized, a separate spacefaring culture emerges.
Eventually, an expedition is organized to travel to and attempt to contact the alien ships, which are voyaging in a region of space several thousand light-years from Earth. A ship, the Envoy, is built, and a crew of 10 is recruited. However, the round trip will take 10,000 years, longer than recorded human history, though the crew will experience only two years in transit in addition to the time they spend at their destination. The Earth they will return to will, in all likelihood, be completely unrecognizable, and they may well be completely forgotten. However, each crew member has his or her reasons for making the sacrifice.
The mission's goal is mostly to learn what it can from contact with another advanced culture. One mystery it would like to solve, however, is why the aliens haven't voyaged beyond a 200-parsec sphere. Once the voyage begins, a new worry crops up. The traces of the interstellar spaceships are diminishing, leaving open the question of whether the crew of the Envoy will even find what they're looking for. And why might this civilization be abandoning interstellar travel?
Fascinating ideas, but flawed
Anderson explores some inventive ideas in Starfarers, and much of the middle of the book is an outstanding example of how to write hard science fiction effectively. Particularly impressive are his depictions of contact with the alien species, the Tahirians, and his development of the relationship between the crew and the Tahirians, along with revelations along the way that some of the assumptions the crew has made about Tahirian culture don't turn out to be accurate. He also makes the scientific ideas come alive through his characters' discovery process. It gives the science an immediacy that simple exposition couldn't achieve. And although he's perhaps a little overoptimistic, Anderson does deal honestly and effectively with the economic challenges of sustaining interstellar trade when ships take decades to travel between ports of call.
Starfarers is not without significant flaws, however. Both the beginning and the end of the book read like propaganda pieces in favor of space travel, without a solidly developed foundation to support the views. More troubling, however, is Anderson's inconsistent, and ultimately ineffective, use of chapters chronicling changes both back on Earth and on the interstellar colonies as the Envoy travels at relativistic speeds. Many of these chapters might be quite interesting as stand-alone short stories, or as part of another work exploring future history, but here they do little more than interrupt the flow of the main narrative, with only a weak payoff at the end of the novel. Starfarers also includes a mutiny episode, presumably to add an action scene, which mostly reads like a bad cliche, especially since its foreshadowing is far too obvious.
Despite its flaws, Starfarers has enough good qualities to make it worth reading. At his best, Anderson can be a fascinating writer. With some judicious editing, Starfarers could have been a much better novel.
Just so no one gets the wrong impression, my propaganda comments above don't mean that I'm against space exploration. I just think that the way Anderson deals with the issue here doesn't rise above cliche, and it would be nice to see these arguments approached with more subtlety, complexity or originality.
-- Clint
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Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy
SF has never been the same since James Tiptree Jr. became Alice Sheldon
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Flying Cups and Saucers
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Edited by Debbie Notkin and The Secret Feminist Cabal
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Edgewood Press
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$18.00
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Trade Paperback, 1998
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ISBN 0-9629066-8-9
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Review by Nalo Hopkinson
n the 1970s, SF author Alice Sheldon wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. because, in the male-dominated world of '70s SF, it seemed as though her insightful explorations of gender roles wouldn't be published any other way. She died in 1987, but in 1991 authors Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler inaugurated the James Tiptree Jr. Award for SF that examines gender and gender roles. The award, funded through the "women's work" of bake sales, has been tremendously successful. Some more paranoid voices have hinted at an unspoken female conspiracy; hence the "Secret Feminist Cabal" that claims co-editorship of Flying Cups and Saucers.
The 13 stories that make up this anthology were chosen from short lists submitted by the Tiptree Award juries. The ultimate actor plays Salome the temptress in "And Salome Danced" by Kelly Eskridge; "The Lovers" by Eleanor Arnason is the first boy-meets-girl romance novel from a culture where the concept of love between men and women does not exist; James Patrick Kelly's "Chemistry" makes the sensation of falling in love a purchasable commodity; "Forgiveness Day" by Ursula Le Guin throws together two people from opposite sides of the gender war and forces them to learn about each other.
"A Matter of Seggri," also by Le Guin, imagines a world where women rule and men are chattel; "Some Strange Desire," by Ian Mcdonald, "Eat Reecebread" by Graham Joyce and Peter Hamilton and "Motherhood, Etc." by L. Timmel Duchamp all explore human fascination with hermaphroditism; "Venus Rising" by Carol Emshwiller extrapolates the "arboreal ape" vs. "aquatic ape" theories of evolution, "Planet of the Apes"-style; during Custer's last stand, "The Other Magpie" by R. Garcia y Robertson is a transgendered Native person caught in a clash with a heterosexist culture; "Food Man" by Lisa Tuttle examines an anorexic girl's hunger for self-control; in "Young Woman in a Garden" by Delia Sherman a graduate student tries to discover the truth of the connections that link a long-dead impressionist painter, his model and his wife; and in "Grownups" by Ian McLeod, pre-teens gradually learn the truth of the pubertal changes that will take them into a very alien adulthood.
Re-thinking gender
Now that women are well represented in SF, why is there a Tiptree Award at all? Why reprint some of its short-listed stories in one anthology? Because more than 30 years after James Tiptree Jr. "became" Alice Sheldon, gender, gender roles and sexuality are still contested ground. And not just for women; in 1998, the Tiptree organizers changed the description of the award to read "exploration of male and female gender and gender roles." In a world where gender equality is still seen as a "women's issue," it became necessary to clarify. In fact, the preponderance of intersexed characters in Flying Cups and Saucers would seem to indicate a re-thinking of gender itself, not just gender roles.
The stories in the anthology are a record of speculative exploration on one of humankind's most troubled fronts. Sometimes their images are disturbing: a menstruating man, or an incubus as the perfect whore. Sometimes they are leavened by joy: a tribe of sentient aquatic mammals frolics with otters in the ocean. Sometimes there is love in unexpected places: in a binary world, three people find a way to honor the love they feel for each other. The writers are women and men--people--whose work pokes and prods at entrenched gender biases. A few of the stories have weak spots, but overall, the collection leaves a powerful impression.
I was a juror for the Tiptree Award in 1997 and I was asked to write a blurb for Flying Cups and Saucers. My enthusiasm for the collection does, I think, show.
-- Nalo
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